Strange Tribe: a family memoir - Paperback

by John Hemingway (Author)

A memoir that is at once fascinating, compelling, and heartbreaking, STRANGE TRIBE reveals the peculiar dynamics between Ernest Hemingway and his youngest son, Gregory, the author's father. Gregory tried to live up to Ernest's macho reputation throughout his life. Yet as a cross-dresser and (ultimately) a transsexual, Gregory was obsessed with his "female half," and he struggled with personal demons until his death at the Women's Correctional Facility of the Miami-Dade County Jail in 2001. The media referred to Gregory as the "black sheep" of the Hemingway family. Gregory's son, however, wasn't so sure. In this wonderfully created narrative, John Hemingway reveals how Ernest himself felt a special kinship with Gregory, and how the two men (who both suffered from bipolar illness and shared a fascination with androgyny) were actually two sides of the same coin. Featuring several newly published letters between Ernest and Gregory, STRANGE TRIBE reveals their unknown similarities. In the end, John comes to feel that in his father's lifelong struggles, Gregory most exemplified Ernest's ideal of grace under pressure. This is also John's coming-of-age story---of what it was like growing up in Miami and Montana with his father and his schizophrenic mother, how it took him years to deal to deal with the pain their illnesses caused him, and how he ultimately fled the burden of the Hemingway name and family history, one marked by multiple suicides, by moving to Italy in 1984. Now able for the first time to confront the legacy of his troubled father and famous grandfather, John also examines his own life and role as a father. Along the way, his honest, piercing, and uniquely revealing story forces us to reevaluate the work of Ernest Hemingway, one of the most important literary icons of the past hundred years, whose persona continues to loom darkly over the often-troubled lives of his descendants.